Youth Challenges Part 6

His father called him, and he responded apathetically.

"Here are some letters," said Mr. Foote. "I have made notes upon each one how it is to be answered. Be so good as to dictate the replies."

There it was again. He was not even to answer letters independently, but to dictate to his secretary words put into his mouth by Bonbright Foote, Incorporated.

"It will help you familiarize yourself with our routine," said his father, "and your signature will apprise the recipients that Bonbright Foote VII has entered the concern."

He returned to his desk and pressed the buzzer that would summon Ruth Frazer with book and pencil. She entered almost instantly, and as their eyes met she smiled her famous smile. It was a thing of light and brightness, compelling response. In his mood it acted as a stimulant to Bonbright.

"Thank you," he said, involuntarily.

"For what?" she asked, raising her brows.

"For--why, I'm sure I don't know," he said. "I don't know why I said that.... Will you take some letters, please?"

He began dictating slowly, laboriously. It was a new work to him, and he went about it clumsily, stopping long between words to arrange his thoughts. His attention strayed. He leaned back in his chair, dictation forgotten for the moment, staring at Ruth Frazer without really being conscious of her presence. She waited patiently. Presently he leaned forward and addressed a question to her:

"Did you and Mr. Dulac mention me as you walked home?"

"Yes," she said.

"Would it be--impertinent," he asked, "to inquire what you said?"

She wrinkled her brows to aid recollection.

"Mr. Dulac," she replied, "wondered what you were up to. That was how he expressed it. He thought it was peculiar--your asking to know him."

"What did YOU think?"

"I didn't think it was peculiar at all. You"--she hesitated--"had been taken sort of by surprise. Yes, that was it. And you wanted to KNOW. I think you acted very naturally."

"Naturally!" he repeated after her. "Yes, I guess that must be where I went wrong. I was natural. It is not right to be natural. You should first find how you are expected to act--how it is planned for you to act. Yourself--why, yourself doesn't count."

"What do you mean, Mr. Foote?"

"This morning," he said, bitterly, "cards with my name signed to them have been placed, or will be placed, in every room of the works, notifying the men that if they join a labor union they will be discharged."

"Why--why--"

"I have made a statement that I am against labor unions."

She looked at him uncomprehendingly, but somehow compelled to sympathize with him. He had pa.s.sed through a bitter crisis of some sort, she perceived.

"I am not interested in all those men--that army of men," he went on.

"I don't want to understand them. I don't want to come into contact with them. I just want to sit here in my office and not be bothered by such things.... We have managers and superintendents and officials to take care of labor matters. I don't want to talk to Dulac about what he means, or why our men feel resentment toward us. Please tell him I have no interest whatever in such things."

"Mr. Foote," she said, gently, "something has happened to you, hasn't it? Something that has made you feel bitter and discouraged?"

"Nothing unusual--in my family--Miss Frazer. I've just been cut to the Bonbright Foote pattern. I didn't fit my groove exactly--so I was trimmed until I slipped into it. I'm in now."

A sudden tumult of shouts and cheers arose in the street under his window; not the sound of a score of voices nor of a hundred, but a sound of great volume. Ruth looked up, startled, frightened. Bonbright stepped to the window. "It's only eleven o'clock," he said, "but the men are all coming out.... The whistle didn't blow. They're cheering and capering and shaking hands with one another. What does that mean, do you suppose?"

"I'm afraid," said Miss Frazer, "it's your placard."

"My placard?"

"The men had their choice between their unions and their jobs--and they've stood by their unions."

"You mean--?"

"They've struck," said Ruth.

CHAPTER V

There are family traditions among the poor just as there are among the rich. The families of working-men may cling as tenaciously to their traditions as the descendants of an earl. In certain families the sons are compelled by tradition to become bakers, in others machinists; still other lowly family histories urge their members to conduct of one sort or another. It is inherent in them to hold certain beliefs regarding themselves. Here is a family whose tradition is loyalty to another family which has employed the father, son, grandfather; across the street may live a group whose peculiar religion is to oppose all const.i.tuted authority and to uphold anarchism. Theories and beliefs are handed down from generation to generation until they a.s.sume the dignity of blood laws.

Bonbright was being wrenched to fit into the Foote tradition. Ruth Frazer, his secretary, needed no alterations to conform to the tradition of HER family. This was the leveling tradition; the elevating of labor and the pulling down of capital until there was a dead level of equality--or, perhaps, with labor a bit in the saddle. Probably a remote ancestor of hers had been a member of an ancient guild; perhaps one had risen with Wat Tyler. Not a man of the family, for time beyond which the memory of man runneth not, but had been a whole-souled, single-purposed labor man--trade-union man--extremist--revolutionist.

Her father had been killed in a labor riot--and beatified by her. As the men of her family had been, so were the women--so was she.

Rights of man, tyranny of capital, cla.s.s consciousness had been taught her with her nursery rhymes. She was a zealot. A charming zealot with a soul that laughed and wanted all mankind to be happy with it--a soul that translated itself by her famous grin.

When she thought of capital, of moneyed aristocracy in the ma.s.s and in the abstract, she hated it. It was a thing to be uprooted, plotted against, reviled. When she met a member of it in the body, and face to face, as she was meeting Bonbright Foote, she could not hate. He was a man, an individual. She could not withhold from him the heart-warming flash of her smile, could not wish him harm. Somehow, in the concrete, he became a part of mankind, and so ent.i.tled to happiness.

She was sincere. In her heart she prayed for the revolution. Her keen brain could plan for the overthrow of the enemy and her soul could sacrifice her body to help to bring it to pa.s.s. She believed. She had faith. Her actions would be true to her faith even at a martyr cost.

But to an individual whom she saw face to face, let him be the very head and front of the enemy, and she could not wish him personal harm.

To a psychologist this might have presented a complex problem. To Ruth it presented no problem at all. It was a simple condition and she lived it.

She was capable of hero worship, which, after all, is the keystone of aristocracies. But her heroes were not warriors, adventurers, conquerors of the world, conquerors of the world's wealth. They were revolutionists. They were men who gave their lives and their abilities to laboring for labor.... Already she was inclining to light the fires of her hero worship at the feet of the man Dulac.

Ruth Frazer's grin has been spoken of. It has been described as a grin.

That term may offend some sensitive eye as an epithet applicable only to something common, vulgar. To smile is proper, may even be aristocratic; only small boys and persons of slack breeding are guilty of the grin.... Ruth Frazer's grin was neither common nor vulgar. It was warming, encouraging, bright with the flashing of a quick mind, and withal sweet, womanly, delicious. Yet that it was a grin cannot be denied. Enemies to the grin must make the most of it.

The grin was to be seen, for Dulac had just entered Ruth's mother's parlor, and it glowed for him. The man seemed out of place in that cottage parlor. He seemed out of place in any homelike room, in any room not filled by an eager, sweating, radical crowd of men a.s.sembled to hang upon his words. That was the place for him, the place nature had created him to become. To see him standing alone any place, on the street, in a hotel, affected one with the feeling that he was exotic there, misplaced. He must be surrounded by his audience to be RIGHT.

Something of this crossed Ruth's mind. No woman, seeing a possible man, is without her sentimental speculation. She could not conceive of Dulac in a HOME.

"It's been a day!" he said.

"Yes."

"Every skilled mechanic has struck," he said, with pride, as in a personal achievement. "And most of the rest. To-night four thousand out of their five thousand men were with us."

"It came so suddenly. n.o.body thought of a strike this morning."